Words fly down the halls of power

By Emma ForrestMay 2 2002

The cast of West Wing

Although he is the creator of the White House drama The West Wing,
Aaron Sorkin has had only one experience in politics, and it was brief, long ago
(he was 11), and even then only sparked by a crush. His sixth-grade classmate,
Jenny, volunteered after school at the headquarters of Nixon opponent George
McGovern, so Sorkin did, too. One afternoon, he and Jenny stood beside the road
holding up signs as the Nixon campaign motorcade drove through.

``Mine said nothing more incendiary than `McGovern for President', and a
143-year-old woman came up behind me, grabbed the sign out of my hand, whacked me
over the head with it, threw it on the ground and stomped on it. To the extent
that I have any political agenda at all, it's simply getting back at that woman
somehow with what I write.''

Now 40, Sorkin is possessed of charisma so powerful it is slightly dizzying.
He walks into the breakfast room of a Beverly Hills hotel at 8.29am, apologising
for being late, although he is a minute early. Wearing a sweatshirt and jeans,
he looks simultaneously tough and troubled: he has an actionhero jawline paired
with eyebrows that look like the V a child draws to suggest anger.

It is an indication of his unique status as a writer
that Aaron Sorkin has picture approval on articles about him. This is usually
something requested only by A-list movie stars - Brad, Julia, Nicole - but then
Sorkin is probably the first American writer since Truman Capote who is
recognised on the street, certainly the first television writer. Like Capote,
Sorkin's fame is due to both tremendous talent and a talent for trouble. The
former led to an Oscar nomination at the age of 28 for the screen adaptation of
his hit Broadway play, A Few Good Men. He also wrote the screenplays for
Malice and The American President. It was The American
President that gave him the idea for The West Wing
, the television drama that, since its debut in 1999, has drawn 20 million
viewers a week, won 17 Emmys and developed a cult following in 28 countries,
including Australia.

In so much as there is a shadow cabinet in America, it
is the cast of The West Wing
, strutting down the corridors of power, spouting rapid-fire,
exposition-heavy speeches in a work environment dominated by flirting, ethical
conflict and wicked oneliners. Sorkin's fictional President Bartlet, an
idealistic Democrat played by Martin Sheen, is so popular that during the
nebulous 2000 election, banners went up around the country reading ``My
President is Josiah Bartlet''.

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However, trouble has come at intermittent stages of
Sorkin's marvellous career, zooming across his lifesky like a rare, recurring
comet. In April last year, having just wrapped up the second series of The
West Wing, he was arrested at Burbank airport trying to carry rock cocaine,
mushrooms and hashish on to a flight to Las Vegas. The media had a field day. It
then emerged that in the mid'90s, while writing the screenplay for The
American President
, Sorkin had
been addicted to crack cocaine, but that he had cleaned up after his wife Julia
(from whom he separated just before the arrest and with whom he has a one-year-old
daughter, Roxanne) checked him into a rehabilitation clinic. Sorkin describes
the airport incident as a one-off relapse.

As we wait for breakfast, I ask if he had heard the Queen's phrase, ``annus
horribilis''. He laughs so hard the table shakes. ``That,'' he says, lighting
the first of many cigarettes, ``is truly my favourite expression of Her
Majesty's. This has really been one for the books for me . . . I managed to get
myself exactly where I didn't want to be.''

``Aaron,'' says his friend and mentor, the great screenwriter William
Goldman, ``does not make life easy for Aaron.''

When, for example, Sorkin took on the events of September 11, he was making a
rod for his own back. The episode ``Isaac and Ishmael'', in which President
Bartlet and his staff reacted to a terrorist attack, drew 500 newspaper reviews,
most of them scathing. The suggestion was that this was Sorkin in hubris
overdrive - how dare he attempt to encapsulate, in one small screen hour, the
horror of that day? It was not made clear that Sorkin wrote the episode under
duress.

``If I had been king of the world at that time, I would have said, `Listen,
something very dramatic just happened, this isn't the time to be thinking about
a television series.' ''

But NBC, to which The West Wing is worth $US150 million a year, insisted that
the series be shown as planned. So Sorkin hastily assembled a standalone story
to take the place of the original opener. Without it, he felt the viewers would
not be able to relate to a White House dealing, not with national security, but
repealing estate tax.

``I felt that the audience had been through a terribly traumatic event and
that in order to continue watching the show, they needed to feel like these
characters had been through that event, too . . . The show's heart was in the
right place, it was wellmeaning and so it felt strange that so many people wrote
about it as if I had hit them over the head with a baseball bat and taken their
money.''

Although he still talks in collegeese, sprinkling
intellectual thought with ``ya know'', ``gonna'' and ``wanna'', he never longs
for the days before the Broadway success of A Few Good Men
(written on cocktail napkins during his
shifts as a barman), when he was so poor that he'd invite people over to his
apartment, point at his books, his clothes, his shoes and say, ``name a price''.
But he does yearn for the time when, creatively, no one cared what he wrote.

``When I sit down and write today, I know that the cast and crew and NBC and
Warner Brothers will read it right away and a few weeks after that it will be
seen and judged by 20 million people.''

That The West Wing steadfastly refuses to dumb
down for middle America is rooted in the theatre his parents took him to from a
young age. ``They didn't take me to kid plays, they took me to Who's Afraid
of Virginia Woolf?
and other
plays that a nine or 10-year-old had no business going to.'' He didn't understand
what was going on up there on the stage, but he loved the sound of dialogue.

Dialogue, rather than plot, remains his calling card - especially speeches,
hence his inclination towards writing about politics. As William Goldman notes:
``Speeches are not something you want to be in a film; going by the book, they
should really be avoided. But his are so damn good, you say, `Well, OK'. ''

Trained as an actor, Sorkin didn't even start writing until his early 20s
when, catsitting for a friend, he discovered a typewriter and absently gave it a
go. The same naive impulsiveness would, at the suggestion of a friend a few
years later, lead him to try marijuana and cocaine in one night. The same friend
showed him how to turn coke into crack.

The American President , on which Goldman acted as consultant, took three
years to write, as Sorkin veered between crack binges and writing binges: six
days straight of putting a do-not-disturb sign on his hotel door and banging out
pages. He continues to binge on work, writing - or occasionally co-writing -
every episode of each series himself.

President Bartlet seems, more and more, to represent Sorkin's alter ego: the
idealistic workaholic who wants to stay in power. In the new series, the
president is having panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist, who doesn't
care who he is but just wants him to get better. There remains, for Bartlet and
Sorkin, the inherent conflict between staying true to your ideals and staying in
office.

``I don't know how he does it,'' sighs Goldman, ``but then Aaron is
passionate and strange and nuts.''

``You know,'' says Goldman, with some astonishment,
``that Aaron just wrote his 100th episode of The West Wing
? The pressure is
unimaginable.''